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Figure 8. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for Modern Japanese Literature (1956).
This developing East-West dialogue is abundantly evident in the pages of the Evergreen Review. The first issue to seriously engage Asian culture is volume 2, number 6 (Autumn 1958). Susan Nevelson’s cover photo depicts a young Asian of uncertain gender dressed in black and holding a white dove. The inside cover features a full-page ad for Grove’s lavish production of Ken Domon and Momoo Kitagawa’s study, The Muro-Ji: An Eighth Century Japanese Temple, Its Art and History. And Daisetz T. Suzuki, just finishing a five-year stint as a visiting professor at Columbia University, contributes an essay analyzing the degree to which “Zen has entered internally into every phase of the cultural life of the [Japanese] people.”58 As an illustration, Suzuki offers the “one-corner” style of Japanese painting, characterized by “the least possible number of lines or strokes which go to represent forms.”59 Suzuki sees this style as an instance of the attitude “known as wabi in the dictionary of Japanese cultural terms”; and he explains, “Wabi really means ‘poverty,’ or, negatively, ‘not to be in the fashionable society of the time.’”60
Suzuki’s essay is followed by “Franz Kline Talking,” a transcript of the abstract expressionist painter’s conversation with Frank O’Hara, whose poem “In Memory of My Feelings” is also featured in this issue. O’Hara’s introductory statement triumphantly announces, “The Europeanization of our sensibilities has at last been exorcized as if by magic … which allows us as a nation to exist internationally.”61 Kline discusses his “calligraphic style” in an international context, touching on a variety of painters he admires, including Hokusai, whose painting of Mount Fuji reveals how “his mind has been brought to the utter simplification of it.”62 Kline’s monologue is followed by three reproductions of his calligraphic paintings, stark and simple black brushstrokes that clearly complement Suzuki’s discussion of Zen aesthetics.
Gary Snyder’s translation of the “Cold Mountain Poems” follows Kline’s paintings. Though the poet Han-shan (Cold Mountain) was Chinese, Snyder introduces him as “a robe-tattered wind-swept long-haired laughing man holding a scroll” in a sketch featured in a Japanese art exhibit that came to the United States in 1953.63 Snyder concludes, “He and his sidekick Shih-te (Jittoku in Japanese) became great favorites with Zen painters of later days—the scroll, the broom, the wild hair and laughter. They became immortals and you sometimes run into them today in the skidrows, orchards, hobo jungles, and logging camps of America.”64 Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums, prominently advertised in this issue of the Evergreen Review, to Han-shan. As Kerouac and Snyder’s presence here indicates, Grove’s vision of an East-West dialogue was heavily inflected by the international interests and itineraries of the Beats.
In 1965, Rosset found a modern Japanese author who realized this Beat vision of world literature: Kenzaburo Oe, who had written a dissertation on John-Paul Sartre and whose favorite book was Huckleberry Finn. Oe was fluent in English, a passionate spokesman for the Japanese New Left, and an avid fan of Henry Miller; his international interests jibed perfectly with Rosset’s. The two had become good friends by the time Oe visited the United States in 1968 to attend a Harvard summer seminar on Huckleberry Finn and Invisible Man and to promote A Personal Matter, which Grove had just published. In its “Authors and Editors” column, Publishers Weekly heralded Oe as “Japan’s first ‘modern’ novelist, one whose literary ancestry is wholly Western.”65 In the flyleaf to A Personal Matter, Grove affirmed Oe as “the first truly modern Japanese writer,” one who had single-handedly “wrenched Japanese literature free of its deeply rooted, inbred tradition and moved it into the mainstream of world literature.”
The semiautobiographical plot of A Personal Matter illustrates the degree to which this vision of world literature was rooted in the geopolitics of the American century. Its hero, Bird, is a disaffected graduate student in English who longs to travel to Africa, but he has recently married and his new wife’s pregnancy promises to put an end to his plans. The novel opens with Bird contemplating a map of Africa in a world atlas:
Africa was in the process of dizzying change that would quickly outdate any map. And since the corrosion that began with Africa would eat away the entire volume, opening the book to the Africa page amounted to advertising the obsoleteness of the rest. What you needed was a map that could never be outdated because political configurations were settled. Would you choose America, then? North America, that is?66
With the noticeable absence of Europe, which was also undergoing somewhat dizzying geographic alteration, Bird’s geopolitical musings conveniently lay out the postwar coordinates onto which Grove would map its vision of world literature: a formerly colonized African continent rapidly resolving into a turbulent mosaic of new nations; an American hemisphere renegotiating the scale and scope of the term “America”; and an “East” whose meaning to the “West” is being reconfigured by the US victory in the Pacific theater of World War II.
On Grove’s publicity questionnaire for authors, in answer to the question, “What is the shortest statement you can make that aptly expresses [your book’s] scope and theme?,” Oe wrote: “The effort of a postwar youth of Japan for the genuine authenticity.”67 In his adolescent wanderlust, Bird bears some resemblance to Sal Paradise, but he diverges considerably in his successful discovery of the “authenticity” that Kerouac’s avatars never fully achieve. After spending the entirety of the narrative in contemplation of abandoning his wife and disabled child to run off to Africa with his old girlfriend, Bird in the end decides to stay in Japan as “a guide for foreign tourists.”68 Instead of introducing himself to the world, he will introduce the world to Japan. In a draft of an essay entitled “How I Am a Japanese Writer,” Oe insists, “If we want to find the authenticity of modern, Japanese literature, we must seek for it in the history of encounters with the occidental world, and especially we must seek for it in the history of encounters in which we Japanese played an active, not a passive, part.”69 Oe’s novel, both in its plot and in its publication, can be understood as the implicit object of such a search. Oe was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994, one of five Grove Press authors to win this imprimatur of global literary reputation.
Africa
In the same year that Grove entered into negotiations with Keene over the anthology of Japanese literature, Rosset agreed to be Amos Tutuola’s literary agent in the United States. In the late 1950s Grove published the three texts for which he remains most well known—The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and The Brave African Huntress—while also exerting considerable effort to get his stories into American magazines. The books met with only modest success, and with the exception of a noteworthy inclusion in an Africa-themed issue of the Atlantic Monthly and a single story in the Chicago Review, American editors rejected Tutuola’s apparently formless surrealistic stories. Rosset himself wrote to Tutuola in 1953, complaining, “Sometimes I think that the endings of your stories are rather weak. They might be more definite. We should know that the story has a beginning, middle and end. Also they (your stories) are sometimes too complicated. You start one story and then bring in another story, and the [reader] gets confused about what happened to the first story.”70
Tutuola was initially understood in the United States as a sort of modernist manqué. As Selden Rodman affirms in his review of The Palm-Wine Drinkard, “If you like Anna Livia Plurabelle, Alice in Wonderland, and the poems of Dylan Thomas, the chances are you will like this novel, though probably not for reasons having anything to do with the author’s intentions.” Rodman adds that “Tutuola is not a revolutionist of the word, not a mathematician, not a surrealist. He is a true primitive.”71 This vision of Tutuola as unconscious modernist was reinforced by Kuhlman’s covers for the Evergreen Original versions of his novels. The cover for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts echoes Kuhlman’s designs for Beckett’s trilogy, assimilating Tutuola’s apparent primitivism
to a modernist aesthetic (Figure 9). However, there are figural associations in Kuhlman’s design that anticipate the more nuanced interpretations of Tutuola’s work; the cover clearly references a television screen, commenting on the “Television-Handed Ghostess” who briefly figures in the text.
A more knowledgeable explanation of Tutuola’s syncretism would have to await Grove’s publication of the English translation of Janheinz Jahn’s important study, Muntu: The New African Culture (1961). Jahn, coeditor of Black Orpheus and one of the most influential European scholars of African culture in the postwar era, opens his study with the portentous announcement that “Africa is entering world history.”72 For Jahn, this entry mandates a new approach to the study of African literature. Deprecating earlier efforts to understand African writers in exclusively European terms, Jahn establishes that “the forced classification of neo-African authors into European literary groups … has done more harm than good to the understanding of their poetry.” Jahn further affirms that, since African culture has “spread over several European languages,” it is no longer logical to categorize literatures by national language. Once he analytically divorces nation from language, Jahn is able to claim, “Within African literature Tutuola is intelligible; within English literature he is an oddity.”73
Figure 9. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen edition of
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954).
In his introduction, Jahn quotes extensively from Frantz Fanon, another important author whom Grove published only a few years later. When Grove published Muntu, Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs had not yet been translated into English, but its prominent appearance here reveals the political volatility that roiled the calls for cultural exchange that motivated studies like Jahn’s. Jahn cites Fanon’s text to establish that “there is no universal standard for the evaluation of cultures” and to legitimate his study as an attempt to define and evaluate “neo-African” culture on its own terms.74 By the time Grove published the English translation of Neo-African Literature: A History of Black Writing in 1968, Jahn was explicitly framing this cultural relativism geopolitically:
The end of colonialism does not mean merely redrawing the political maps of Asia and Africa. The independence of the countries outside Europe which were formerly colonies is far from being only a political phenomenon; it tends to find expression in all spheres of life, especially the cultural sphere. If a true partnership is to be reached, the values hitherto centred on Europe need to be reappraised. For each member of a partnership should try to understand every other member on the basis of the fellow-partner’s values—instead of taking his own standards as universally applicable.75
On the one hand, Jahn’s insistence that Europe reappraise its values resonates with the widely shared sense that two world wars had fatally compromised its claims to ethical and political authority and that the literature of postwar Europe, as centrally illustrated by Beckett, affirmed this decline. On the other hand, Jahn’s cultural relativism resonates with the UNESCO mandate, insisting on cultural exchange as a precondition to successful diplomatic relations. By this time, however, UNESCO’s vision was widely seen as hopelessly utopian, and Fanon’s program of regenerative violence had displaced Jahn’s vision of cultural exchange.
America
In 1961, the year that Grove published Muntu, it also published Octavio Paz’s now-classic study Labyrinth of Solitude, which famously announces, “For the first time, we are contemporaries of all mankind.”76 Paz’s pronouncement echoes Jahn’s claim about Africa entering world history, and he affirms that “Mexico’s situation is no different from that of the majority of countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.”77 This perception of simultaneity was crucial to the very possibility of a truly international modernism; insofar as the conceptual coherence of an avantgarde depends upon a linear model of history, an international avantgarde requires that its constituent nations coexist at the same point on the same time line. This sense of global simultaneity began to emerge during the era of decolonization.
Written mostly in Paris, where Paz worked in the Mexican embassy after the war, and addressed partly to readers in the United States, where he had lived for a time during the war, Labyrinth of Solitude illustrates the coincidence of historical simultaneity and cultural difference that informed Grove’s vision of world literature. In early 1961, Paz wrote to Rosset that US readers might be ready to reach a better understanding of his country as well as the larger geopolitical system within which their relations were transforming:
I really do think this is the most opportune time for publication … I have the impression that, since the recent developments in Africa and specially in Cuba, the American people has started to be more conscious of what is called, in the burocratic jargon of our times, “underdevelopped” countries. My book is, in some ways, a portrait of one of those countries, an inquiry made by a native writer (underdeveloped or superdevelopped?).78
Paz was already acquainted with the United States from his tenure as a Guggenheim Fellow at UC Berkeley during the war, and he returned in 1961 at the invitation of the Institute of Contemporary Arts cultural exchange program funded by the Ford Foundation. Paz concedes in his opening chapter, “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” that many of the arguments he develops in Labyrinth of Solitude originally occurred to him during his stay in the States. Such a cultural context provides an important hemispheric sidelight on Paz’s conclusion that, in the postwar era, “the old plurality of cultures … has been replaced by a single civilization and a single future” and that “world history has become everyone’s task, and our own labyrinth is the labyrinth of all mankind.”79
In his preface to the Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, editor Emir Rodríguez Monegal cites Paz’s claim to contemporaneity and dates the boom in Latin American literature to 1961. He chooses this year not because of the US publication of Labyrinth of Solitude but because of another event that also involved Grove Press: the co-awarding of the newly established International Publisher’s Prize to Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett. As José David Saldivar affirms in The Dialectics of Our America, this simultaneous recognition gave “our American literature … its rightful place.”80
It is worth dwelling briefly on the significance of this now defunct prize, which is oddly absent from James English’s otherwise excellent study, The Economy of Prestige. Established by six publishers, Weidenfeld and Nicolson (United Kingdom), Gallimard (France), Einaudi (Italy), Seix Barral (Spain), Rowohlt (Germany), and Grove (United States), the prize was to be given to “an author of any nationality whose existing body of work will, in the view of the jury, be of lasting influence on the development of various national literatures.”81 The publishers themselves established committees that both chose submissions and constituted the jury. The winners were then rewarded with translations into the native languages of the publishers, which by the next year had expanded to eleven. According to Grove’s press release, “The aim of the prize … is to provide the largest possible international audience for the winning author.”82 In other words, to win the prize was to be immediately catapulted into the realm of world literature. In his letter inviting Alfred Kazin to be on the selection committee, Rosset ambitiously affirms that the prize is “similar to something like the Nobel Prize, excepting that we hope it will benefit a writer still in his most creative years and bring world attention to someone who is perhaps not known outside his own country.”83
Grove’s committee included Kazin, Donald Allen, William Barrett, Jason Epstein, and Mark Schorer. Although the committee was free to choose any published writer, the top three nominees were Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet, all Grove Press authors. According to Rosset’s recollection, the initial voting was split between English-and non-English-speaking committees, which meant that Beckett also had the support of the Weidenfeld committee, which included Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch. Borges was endorsed by the Einaudi committee, which included Carlo
Levi, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Italo Calvino; the Seix Barral committee, which consisted almost entirely of Catalan dissidents, including José Castellet, Juan Petit, and Antonio Vilanova, plus Octavio Paz; and the Gallimard committee, which included Michel Butor, Roger Caillois, Raymond Queneau, Jean Paulhan, and Dominique Aury. As Seaver affirms in his memoirs, “There was a clear division between north and south, the Germanic languages on the one hand and the Romance on the other.”84 Awarding the prize to both Borges and Beckett was a compromise, certainly deserving of the historical significance it’s been granted by historians of the Latin American boom. Insofar as both authors had already been consecrated in Paris, their co-award can be seen as marking that city’s persistence as a cultural capital in a postwar literary landscape increasingly dominated by Anglophone and Hispanophone publishing industries.
Borges himself famously commented, “As a consequence of that prize, my books mushroomed overnight throughout the world.”85 Borges’s work in the postwar era was likewise understood in international terms. As Anthony Kerrigan affirms in his translator’s introduction to the Grove Press edition of Ficciones (1962), the “work of Jorge Luis Borges is a species of international literary metaphor.”86 For Kerrigan, Borges’s encyclopedic knowledge transfers “inherited meanings from Spanish and English, French and German, and sums up a series of analogies, of confrontations, or appositions in other nations’ literatures.”87 Borges’s work, in other words, structurally transcends the national literary traditions based in individual European languages. Borges himself, in an essay included in the New Directions anthology of his work, Labyrinths, which was issued in the same year as Ficciones, deprecated “the idea that a literature must define itself in terms of its national traits” and instead announced that Argentines, like Jews, “can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.”88 But he also recognized the belatedness of this appropriation in its relation to the cosmopolitan modernism on which it piggybacks. In his own prologue to the first section of Ficciones, he satirically laments: “The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.”89 Borges’s proto-postmodern aesthetic selfconsciously subordinates itself to high modernism. Instead of writing a new magnum opus, Borges describes imaginary ones that play on the extravagant claims made for those that do exist. In this sense, Ficciones can be further imagined as a series of prefaces—Jason Wilson calls them “essay-cum-short-story-cum-book reviews”—not only to the imaginary texts that they comment upon but to the wave of literary experimentation that they will inspire.90 Furthermore, as librarian and bibliophile, Borges marks an era when world literature can still be understood in terms of the circulation of printed texts.